How I Built An Affiliate Site In Two Days

Building a website is pretty simple when you know how. Monetising a website through advertising platforms is also fairly simple once you look in the right direction. However, creating a website based purely around affiliate content was something I had never done and thought would be a challenge.

Choose A Niche

I would advise looking at something that is of personal interest to you as it makes you more inclined to create the website. Using knowledge that you already have, you will be ale to make decisions on targeting, content and execution a little easier.

Investigate Search Volumes

Once you have identified a niche you want to work in, look at the potential search volume for it. Ultimately, this has to be something that people will buy online for you to make money, but you can also make a side-return on your investment through advertising placed on your website.

Check Domain Name Availability

It’s in common agreement that exact match domains still wield significant power in the search engines – particularly Google. You can use this to your advantage. If you have identified a niche, check to see if the exact match domain name is available.

Create Affiliate Accounts

This was the part that perplexed me the most as it seemed complicated and time consuming. Most online stores run their affiliate program through an affiliate network as opposed to direct. There are several affiliate networks out there including Commission Junction, Paid On Results, Web Gains and Affiliate Window. I would recommend signing up for all of these networks, particularly if you are offering something that is commonly available as it will allow you to offer more products on your affiliate website.

Apply To Join Relevant Merchants

Once your accounts have been approved, I would once again recommend joining merchants that offer your products. In my case it was deodorant for men, so I applied to join most of the pharmacy & health beauty merchants. Take note of which accounts you are accepted into and which ones you are rejected from as you don’t want to be sending traffic and sales to a website you won’t be receiving commission for!

Join Easy Content Units

This is what I refer to as the “secret sauce” for me. Easy Content Units saved me so much time it’s unfathomable as to where I would be without it.

Easy Content Units offers you the ability to create a “customisable unit” that you can populate with products from a variety of merchants & affiliate providers. This can then be customised in terms of looks, colour and style through CSS and then output through a single-line Javascript code snippet for you to insert into your relevant pages.

Don’t be fooled, it’s not as simple as one-click setup – you still have to do some work, however it minimises the workload for you a lot. I will be writing a post in the future detailing my ECU process in much more detail to help you speed this step up.

Creating Your Affiliate Website

I decided to run my first website on the WordPress platform with a premium theme based on the fact I had little-to-no time to create my own platform. I didn’t require a website with a payment gateway, nor did I need a UGC/review system in place.

I scoured several premium WordPress websites including Theme Forest, Templatic and more. In my case I decided on a Templatic theme that allowed me to show categories and products in a respectable manner.

Whilst ECU offers a fantastically easy WordPress plugin, I decided to paste the code into each page directly to ensure I was doing it correctly. If you are building a site with several products, I would recommend the ECU plugin.

Standard Site Launch

Once you have your site ready to launch, I would recommend carrying out several simple SEO practises to ensure your website is at least found. This will of course differ on the platform your website is built on, but I always carry out the following when launching a new website:

Verification & XML Sitemap submission to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Simply to tell the SE’s what pages you have available.

Tweet mentions through accounts with active followers.
I have witnessed phenomenal website indexation through this.

Generic & niche directory submissions.These still work and form a good base for your website and are great for easy one-way links to your website.

Of course there are many, many ways to promote your new affiliate website including blog articles, press releases, PPC advertising etc. It all depends on your spend.

Lastly, good luck if you decide to take the plunge and remember – you don’t know till you try.

If you need any help or advice, feel free to contact me or comment below.

About the Author

Kev Strong is an online marketing consultant at Newcastle Upon Tyne based digital marketing agency, Mediaworks.
A lover of all things search and an ex-web developer, Kev Strong (a.k.a Goosh) is a specialist in advanced search engine optimisation.